by Allan Massie
Unlike his vigorous father, he had little enthusiasm for war or for an energetic foreign policy. He was eager to be at peace with England, and was soon criticised for ‘the inbringing of Englishmen and to the perpetual subjection of this realm’. This was an easy charge to bring, and a hypocritical one, for his critics did not scruple to seek aid from England themselves when it suited them.
James was easily diverted from the business of government. His interests were primarily artistic and intellectual. His tutor – later secretary – Archibald Whitelaw, who had taught at the University of Cologne, was a scholar and collector of manuscripts and an enthusiast for Roman antiquities, and it is reasonable to suppose that he helped form James’s taste. In 1467 James himself commissioned the production of a copy of Mandeville’s Travels, and possibly also a copy of The Aeneid now in Edinburgh University Library.
Two other associates were William Scheves and John Ireland, notable scholars, who greatly disliked each other. Scheves, a graduate of St Andrews, entered the royal household as the King’s physician, and within a few years was made Archbishop of St Andrews. He too was a bibliophile, collecting medical books and Scottish chronicles. His learning and interest in science aroused suspicion; sixteenth-century chroniclers would accuse him of gaining influence over the King by his mastery of the occult, a suspicion probably baseless but generated by James’s keen interest in astrology. Ireland, educated at the Sorbonne and later a teacher at the College of Navarre, had served Louis XI of France before returning to Scotland, where he became the King’s confessor and a member of his council. The presence at court of men like Whitelaw, Scheves and Ireland demonstrates a stirring of intellectual activity, encouraged by the King and reflecting his temperament and tastes.
Despite later criticism, association with such men did no harm to the King’s reputation among contemporaries. They were churchmen and scholars, regarded as suitable royal advisers. If the nobility weren’t all illiterate, few among them were competent to draw up bills to be presented to Parliament or to engage in diplomatic correspondence with foreign states. The King needed clerks, and only the Church could supply them. He needed advisers as comfortable with the written as the spoken word, and again these were to be found only among ecclesiastics.
It was, however, a different matter when the King chose to consort with social inferiors rather than members of the nobility; still worse if he was believed to be guided by their advice. And this was the case with James III. Most kings have had favourites, those with whom they feel at ease and pass their hours of leisure, but to nobles quick to take offence it seemed scandalous that the King should prefer the company of ‘masons and fiddlers’.
The mason in this instance was one Robert Cochrane, certainly close to the King, but probably an architect rather than the mere stonemason as which he was disparaged. James was the first of the Stewart kings to evince an interest in building, which accounts for his patronage of Cochrane, even if the claim that he was responsible for the Great Hall of Stirling Castle is not supported by evidence. But James did commission work at the castle and also at Linlithgow, and promoted the building of collegiate churches, and it is reasonable to suppose that Cochrane had a hand in this. The ‘fiddler’ was William Rogers – not only a social inferior, but an Englishman. Rogers was in all probability an accomplished musician, and James had sufficient interest in music to have sent a favoured lute-player overseas to further his musical education, and to have presented an organ to the collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity, his mother’s foundation in Edinburgh. (These collegiate churches, a recent development, specialised in enriching divine service with choral and instrumental musical accompaniments.) A later, more civil, age would have found nothing reprehensible in such royal patronage of a distinguished musician.
Among the other favourites were Torphichen, a fencing master, Hommyl, described as a tailor, and Leonard, said to be a shoemaker. Again it is likely that the descriptions handed down to us were wilfully derogatory. James was also a patron of poets, among them Robert Henryson from Dunfermline, one of the most accomplished and sophisticated of the so-called ‘Scottish Chaucerians’. The names of other poets, whose work has not survived but who were subsequently listed by William Dunbar in his poem ‘Timor Mortis Conturbat Me’, appear in the treasurer’s accounts as recipients of royal pensions. All this suggests that James III’s interests were wider than those of most of the nobility, and that the King was something of an aesthete and intellectual, one, moreover, if the association with William Scheves is anything to go by, who dabbled in science. This may render him interesting and even admirable. It didn’t in the circumstances of his age equip him to be a successful monarch.
He was unfortunate in another respect; he had brothers of mature years: Alexander, Duke of Albany, and John, Earl of Mar. Albany at least was ambitious, and, as time would show, unscrupulous. Of Mar’s character nothing is known, but he does seem to have enjoyed some popularity, which suggests that he may have had an ease of manner and a degree of charm. Both excelled in the manly exercises of hunting, hawking and competing in tournaments, for which the King had little taste, and both were jealous of James’s ‘favourites’, especially if they believed that he preferred their company and advice; likewise the favourites had little love for the royal brothers.
Albany held the office of Warden of the Eastern March and was also governor of Berwick. In this capacity he fell out with some of the Border lords, the Homes and the Hepburns, who were quick to accuse him of treasonable correspondence with England. According to one tale, they persuaded Cochrane to use his influence with the King to destroy Albany. Cochrane, the story goes, then produced an astrologer who declared that a lion would be devoured by its own whelps, the meaning of which was that the King would be killed by members of his own family. The story, it must be said, has every indication of being a later invention.3
The King was persuaded. Albany and Mar were arrested, the former charged with treasonable communication with England, the latter with having employed witchcraft against the King. Albany may well have been guilty; certainly his subsequent conduct makes the accusation credible. As for Mar, there is no evidence one way or the other.
Mar died in prison, and there were some ready to hold that he had been murdered by order of the King. There are different versions of the supposed murder. According to one account, the Earl was smothered in his bath; according to another, he slowly bled to death. Equally he may have died of natural causes, and James may have been innocent of any crime. Foolishly, however, he gave some credibility to the rumour by granting Cochrane the revenues from the dead man’s earldom and perhaps – accounts vary – the title of Earl of Mar also.
Albany was held in Edinburgh Castle and contrived a dramatic escape. Friends sent him two casks of wine and, concealed in them, a coil of rope, and a letter warning him to act quickly, for the date of his execution had been set. The Duke, who shared lodgings with one of his retainers, invited the governor to dine with him. The governor accepted the invitation and brought a couple of his officers with him. They were settled by the fire and the wine flowed freely, until at last governor and officers were either incapably drunk or asleep. Whereupon Albany and his colleague seized their daggers, murdered them and threw their bodies on the fire. They then unwound the rope to make their escape. The retainer went first, found the rope too short, fell and broke his leg. Albany lengthened the rope with the sheets from his bed, made his descent, and, carrying his comrade on his shoulders, headed for Leith and a waiting ship, which carried him to France.
It is probable that the tale has gained in the telling, but it was quickly disseminated, and may have served the purpose of making Albany appear a bold, even heroic, figure.
It was not long before he was ready to make trouble again. Finding Louis XI of France unwilling to help him (though he did provide him with a noble wife), he crossed over to England and came to an agreement with Edward IV.
In the letter of this agreement, Albany, styl
ing himself ‘Alexander R’, swore to do homage to the English king for ‘my realm of Scotland’, to break the old alliance with France, and to hand over Berwick to England. The next day, either thinking he had not gone far enough to secure Edward’s goodwill, or perhaps compelled by the English king, he added much of southern Scotland – Liddesdale, Eskdale, Annandale and Lochmaben – to the gift of Berwick. He also promised to marry Edward’s daughter Cecily (who happened to be engaged to his brother James’s heir) as soon as he could ‘clear himself from all other women’.
This was a remarkable document.
In 1482, at the head of an English army reinforced by dissident Scots, among them the long-exiled Earl of Douglas, Albany invaded Scotland. James, despite his wish for friendship with England, had no choice but to assemble an army to meet the invaders. He did so with difficulty, for many of his nobles were disaffected. They distrusted the King, and resented the influence of his ‘low-born’ favourites. A particular grievance was a recent devaluation of the coinage, brass and other base metals being mixed with silver to make coins that were supposed to retain their original value. This was held to be the work of the detested Cochrane, and had rendered the King as unpopular with merchants and craftsmen as he already was with the nobility. His critics took advantage of the opportunity and confronted James with an ultimatum: he must dismiss his favourites and restore the value of the coinage, or he could confront his rebel brother without their assistance. Showing characteristic Stewart obstinacy, James refused to meet their demands. They acted promptly, seized a number of his favourites, Cochrane among them, and hanged them in a row from the high bridge at Lauder, where the King had assembled his army. Only one, a sixteen-year-old boy, John Ramsay of Balmain, was spared. The King had begged for his life, but the unusual clemency was more likely prompted by the realisation that young Ramsay was both a Scot and well born.
According to a story that became popular in legend, but that may have a kernel of truth, the dissident nobles, while eager to lynch the King’s favourites, nevertheless suffered from cold feet, none daring to make the first move. They therefore found themselves in the position of the mice in the fable resolved to hang a bell round the cat’s neck so that they might be warned of his approach, but each reluctant to undertake the dangerous duty. The matter was settled only when the Red Douglas Earl of Angus stepped forward to declare that he would ‘bell the cat’. At this moment Cochrane swaggered into the chamber in all his finery, and was seized upon by Angus. The story deserves this much credence: that posterity remembered Angus by the nickname ‘Bellthe-Cat’.4
Having disposed of the favourites, the rebel lords then made peace with Albany. The discredited King was kept under house arrest in Edinburgh Castle and Albany was named lieutenant of the kingdom of Scotland. His new appointment did not prevent him from continuing to assure Edward IV of England that he stood by the treaty he had made. However, his ascendancy did not last long, either on account of his incapacity or because rumours of his relations with the English king were circulating and undermining his position. Meanwhile James was cultivating the moderates among his critics and promising to amend his ways. A rightful king who acted in a conciliatory fashion could usually regain ground, such was the innate respect for the authority of the Crown, if not for the individual who wore it. In 1483 Albany resigned, or, more probably, was compelled to resign his lieutenancy, and returned to England. The death of his patron Edward in the same year further weakened his position, and Parliament, prompted by the King, obediently declared his estates forfeit to the Crown. It was perhaps in desperation that Albany led another, largely English, army north a few months later. This time the King’s army came to battle and won the victory. Albany’s ally, the aged Earl of Douglas, was taken prisoner, but permitted to retire to a monastery, so that, after thirty years of exile, the last of the Black Douglases ended his turbulent career in the odour of piety. Albany himself fled to France, where he was killed in a skirmish a year later: a squalid end to a futile life.
James had seen off his brother, but his position was not secure, though he may have supposed it now was. He acted vigorously rather than wisely. He continued to neglect the nobles, who regarded themselves as his proper councillors, while at the same time threatening their interests. In 1487 he proposed to annex half the revenues of the Benedictine monastery of Coldingham in order to attach them to his own Chapel Royal. His motive may have been admirable. James was personally devout, interested in new developments in the Church, notably the collegiate chapels and their offering of a more refined and spiritual form of worship. The monasteries on the other hand were regarded by some as institutions that no longer served the religious needs of the time. James’s action was therefore defensible, in tune with advanced thinking. Unfortunately for him, the revenues of Coldingham had been assigned to the powerful border family of Home, who naturally resented their appropriation. Matters were made worse in January 1488 when James had Parliament threaten action against anyone who opposed this transfer of revenues. This was alarming. If the King was supported by Parliament in this attack on property rights, whose property could be thought secure? The Homes found allies among the disgruntled nobility, notably Bell-the-Cat himself.
James had alienated the greater part of the nobility of southern Scotland, but he could still look for support from nobles north of the Forth. His position was far from hopeless. He held Stirling Castle, the key stronghold of central Scotland, and, leaving his fifteen-year-old son and heir, Prince James, in the charge of its governor, Shaw of Fintrie, crossed the Forth to muster an army. Meanwhile the rebel lords issued a proclamation accusing the King of bringing Englishmen into the country to subvert the traditional liberties of Scotland. More significantly, they bribed Shaw to break his promise to the King and deliver the Prince into their keeping. Then they announced their intention of deposing this unworthy King, who was proving himself a traitor to Scotland, and putting the Prince on the throne in his stead. The charges were false, but James was now so unpopular that many were ready to believe them.
Nevertheless, he was able to raise troops in the north, and the two armies met at Sauchieburn, near Stirling, on 11 June. The battle may have been no more than a skirmish, but the King’s men were scattered. James himself, making his escape, was thrown from his horse. A woman drawing water from a well asked him who he was, and got the reply, ‘I was your King this day at morn.’ He was taken into her cottage, where he asked her to fetch a priest. A man appeared, saying he was indeed a priest, entered the cottage, and stabbed the King to death.5
The murderer was never discovered, and it seems that no great attempt was made to do so. It is not even known whether he was a priest or not. The conclusion must be that James’s death was so convenient that few, if any, questions were asked. If he was indeed ‘the most enigmatic of the Stewarts’, then it may be thought appropriate that his death remains mysterious. Yet it is curious that, in comparison with the murder of James I before him, and Mary Stuart’s husband Darnley later, this unsolved crime has attracted so little attention.
In some respects James III was an untypical Stewart, evidently lacking the ability possessed by so many members of the family to charm and attract loyalty; lacking also native authority. Clearly too something about him aroused mistrust. In this he bears some resemblance to his descendant Charles I; and like Charles, his virtues were private rather than public. He was a patron of the arts, sincerely religious, and a loving husband; a good man perhaps, but an inadequate king. There was a perceived shiftiness in his character and he evidently lacked the tough masculinity that his position demanded. As a measure of his failure, one may observe that no other medieval Scottish king was confronted with a rebellion apparently led by his own son.
Chapter 7
James IV (1488–1513): The Flower of the Scottish Renaissance
There was a fifteenth-century French saying: ‘fier comme un Ecossais’,1 and it might have been coined with James IV in mind. His reign would see the brief f
lowering of Renaissance Scotland, and James seemed to embody its spirit. He encouraged and patronised the arts, letters and sciences; William Dunbar, the most accomplished virtuoso among Scottish poets, was employed as his court laureate, complaining, however, as writers will, that he was inadequately rewarded. The King built nobly: the Great Hall of Stirling Castle, much of Falkland Palace, Linlithgow Palace, and the first Palace of Holyroodhouse date from his reign. He created a navy – though it is now recognised that his father had set this work in motion. He travelled all over his kingdom, dispensing justice, a duty his father had been accused, rightly or wrongly, of neglecting. The great Dutch scholar Erasmus, employed as tutor to the King’s illegitimate son, Alexander, said that James had ‘a wonderful intellectual power, and astonishing knowledge of everything, unconquerable magnanimity and the most abundant generosity’.2 The Spanish ambassador, Pedro de Ayala,3 reported to his sovereigns, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, that James was ‘of noble stature, neither tall nor short, and as handsome in complexion and shape as a man can be. He speaks the following languages: Latin, very well; French, German, Flemish, Italian and Spanish.’ To these may be added Scots, English and Gaelic; he was the last King of Scots to be fluent in the tongue that Gaels call ‘the language of the gods’.4
Kings of course are there to be flattered, and when a king condescends to a commoner, it is natural that he should be praised in return. But Ayala, writing in cipher to his employers, can have had little reason to dissemble. It is fair therefore to conclude that this was indeed the impression that James made on those who knew him. The list of his acknowledged mistresses suggests that he may have been as attractive to women as his descendant Charles II was to be. Like Charles too he cared for his illegitimate children, but while Charles made his bastard sons dukes, James made his favourite among them, Alexander, Erasmus’s pupil, Archbishop of St Andrews when the boy was only eleven, and chancellor before he was twenty-one.
